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Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. (November 11, 1922 – April 11, 2007) was an American writer. His works such as Cat's Cradle (1963), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), and Breakfast of Champions (1973) blend satire, gallows humor, and science fiction. As a citizen he was a lifelong supporter of the American Civil Liberties Union and a critical pacifist intellectual. He was known for his humanist beliefs and was honorary president of the American Humanist Association.
The New York Times headline at the time of Vonnegut's passing called Vonnegut "the counterculture's novelist."
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to third-generation German-American parents Kurt Vonnegut, Sr., and Edith (Lieber) Vonnegut. Both his father and his grandfather Bernard Vonnegut attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and were architects in the Indianapolis firm of Vonnegut & Bohn. His great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, Sr., was the founder of the Vonnegut Hardware Company, an Indianapolis firm. Vonnegut had an older brother, Bernard and a sister, Alice. Vonnegut graduated from Shortridge High School in Indianapolis in May 1940 and went to Cornell University that fall. Though majoring in chemistry, he was Assistant Managing Editor and Associate Editor of The Cornell Daily Sun. He was a member of the Delta Upsilon Fraternity, as was his father. While at Cornell, Vonnegut enlisted in the United States Army. The Army transferred him to the Carnegie Institute of Technology and finally the University of Tennessee to study mechanical engineering.
On Mother's Day 1944, while on leave during World War II, he discovered that his mother had committed suicide with sleeping pills.
Reassigned to a combat unit due to the manpower needs of the Allied invasion of France, Vonnegut was captured while a private with the 423rd Infantry Regiment, 106th Infantry Division during the Battle of the Bulge. On December 19, 1944, the 106th Division was cut off from the rest of Courtney Hodges's First Army. "The other American divisions on our flanks managed to pull out; we were obliged to stay and fight. Bayonets aren't much good against tanks".Imprisoned in Dresden, he was chosen as a leader of the POWs because he spoke some German. After telling some German guards "what was going to do to them when the Russians came", he was beaten and had his position as leader revoked. He witnessed the Allied firebombing of Dresden in February 1945, which destroyed most of the historic city.
Vonnegut was part of a group of American prisoners of war who survived the bombing in an underground slaughterhouse meat locker used as an ad hoc detention facility. The German guards called the building Schlachthof Fünf ("Slaughterhouse Five" , and the POWs adopted that name. Vonnegut said that the aftermath of the attack on the defenseless city was "utter destruction" and "carnage unfathomable". The experience was the inspiration for his famous novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, and is a central theme in at least six of his other books. In Slaughterhouse-Five he recalls that the ruins of the city looked like the surface of the moon. He said the German guards put the surviving POWs to work, breaking into basements and bomb shelters to gather bodies for mass burial, while German civilians cursed and threw rocks at them. Vonnegut remarked, "There were too many corpses to bury. So instead the Germans sent in troops with flamethrowers. All these civilians' remains were burned to ashes."
Vonnegut was liberated by Red Army soldiers in May 1945 at the Saxony-Czechoslovakian border. On his return to America, he was awarded a Purple Heart for what he called a "ludicrously negligible wound," later writing facetiously in Timequake that he was given the decoration after suffering a case of "frostbite". Vonnegut's experience as a soldier and prisoner of war had a profound influence on his later work.
The author's name appears in print as "Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.," throughout the first half of his published writing career; beginning with the 1976 publication of Slapstick, he dropped the "Jr." and was simply billed as Kurt Vonnegut. His older brother, Bernard Vonnegut, was an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany, who discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding, the process of artificially stimulating precipitation.
After returning from World War II, Kurt Vonnegut married his childhood sweetheart, Jane Marie Cox, writing about their courtship in several of his short stories. In the 1960s they lived in Barnstable, Massachusetts, where for a while Vonnegut worked at a Saab dealership. The couple separated in 1970; that same year, Vonnegut began living with the woman who would later become his second wife, photographer Jill Krementz, although he did not divorce Cox until 1979. Krementz and Vonnegut were married after the divorce from Cox was finalized.
He raised seven children: three from his first marriage; three of his sister Alice's four children, adopted by Vonnegut after her death from cancer; and a seventh, Lily, adopted with Krementz. His son, Mark Vonnegut, a pediatrician, has written two books: one about his experiences in the late 1960s and his major psychotic breakdown and recovery; the other includes anecdotes of growing up when his father was a struggling writer, his subsequent illness and a more recent breakdown in 1985, as well as what life has been like since then. Mark was named after Mark Twain, whom Vonnegut considered an American saint.
His daughter Edith ("Edie", an artist, was named after Kurt Vonnegut's mother, Edith Lieber. She has had her work published in a book titled Domestic Goddesses and was once married to Geraldo Rivera. His youngest biological daughter, Nanette ("Nanny", was named after Nanette Schnull, Vonnegut's paternal grandmother. She is married to realist painter Scott Prior and is the subject of several of his paintings, notably "Nanny and Rose."
Of Vonnegut's four adopted children, three are his nephews: James, Steven, and Kurt Adams; the fourth is Lily, a girl he adopted as an infant in 1982. James, Steven, and Kurt were adopted after a traumatic week in 1958, in which their father James Carmalt Adams was killed on September 15 in the Newark Bay rail crash when his commuter train went off the open Newark Bay bridge in New Jersey, and their mother — Kurt's sister Alice — died of cancer. In Slapstick, Vonnegut recounts that Alice's husband died two days before Alice herself, and her family tried to hide the knowledge from her, but she found out when an ambulatory patient gave her a copy of the New York Daily News a day before she herself died. The fourth and youngest of the boys, Peter Nice, went to live with a first cousin of their father in Birmingham, Alabama, as an infant. Lily is a singer, actress, and the producer of the YouTube series "The Most Popular Girls in School."
Vonnegut's first wife Jane Marie Cox later married Adam Yarmolinsky and wrote an account of the Vonneguts' life with the Adams children. It was published after her death as the book Angels Without Wings: A Courageous Family's Triumph Over Tragedy.
On November 11, 1999, an asteroid was named in Vonnegut's honor: 25399 Vonnegut.
A lifelong smoker, Vonnegut smoked unfiltered Pall Mall cigarettes, a habit he referred to as a "classy way to commit suicide."
Vonnegut taught at Harvard University, where he was a lecturer in English, and the City College of New York, where he was a Distinguished Professor.
Vonnegut died on April 11, 2007, after falling down a flight of stairs in his home and suffering massive head trauma.
Vonnegut's first short story, "Report on the Barnhouse Effect," appeared in the February 11, 1950, edition of Collier's (it has since been reprinted in his short story collection, Welcome to the Monkey House). His first novel was the dystopian novel Player Piano (1952), in which human workers have been largely replaced by machines. He continued to write short stories before his second novel, The Sirens of Titan, was published in 1959.Through the 1960s, the form of his work changed, from the relatively orthodox structure of Cat's Cradle (which in 1971 earned him a Master's Degree) to the acclaimed, semi-autobiographical Slaughterhouse-Five, given a more experimental structure by using time travel as a plot device. These structural experiments were continued in Breakfast of Champions (1973), which includes many rough illustrations, lengthy non-sequiturs, and an appearance by the author himself as a deus ex machina.
Breakfast of Champions became one of his best-selling novels. It includes, in addition to the author himself, several of Vonnegut's recurring characters. One of them, science fiction author Kilgore Trout, plays a major role and interacts with the author's character.
In 1974, Venus on the Half-Shell, a book by Philip José Farmer in a style similar to that of Vonnegut and attributed to Kilgore Trout, was published. This caused some confusion among readers, as for some time many assumed that Vonnegut wrote it; when the truth of its authorship came out, Vonnegut was reported as being "not amused." In an issue of the semi-prozine The Alien Critic/Science Fiction Review, published by Richard E. Geis, Farmer claimed to have received an angry, obscenity-laden telephone call from Vonnegut about it.
Although many of his novels involved science fiction themes, they were widely read and reviewed outside the field, due in no small part to their anti-authoritarianism. For example, in his seminal short story "Harrison Bergeron," egalitarianism is rigidly enforced by overbearing state authority, engendering horrific repression.
In much of his work, Vonnegut's own voice is apparent, often filtered through the character of science fiction author Kilgore Trout (whose name is based on that of real-life science fiction writer Theodore Sturgeon). It is characterized by wild leaps of imagination and a deep cynicism, tempered by humanism. In the foreword to Breakfast of Champions, Vonnegut wrote that as a child, he saw men with locomotor ataxia, and it struck him that these men walked like broken machines; it followed that healthy people were working machines, suggesting that humans are helpless prisoners of determinism. Vonnegut also explored this theme in Slaughterhouse-Five, in which protagonist Billy Pilgrim "has come unstuck in time" and has so little control over his own life that he cannot even predict which part of it he will be living through from minute to minute. Vonnegut's well-known phrase "so it goes," used ironically in reference to death, also originated in Slaughterhouse-Five. "Its combination of simplicity, irony, and rue is very much in the Vonnegut vein."
With the publication of his novel Timequake in 1997, Vonnegut announced his retirement from writing fiction. He continued to write for the magazine In These Times, where he was a senior editor, until his death in 2007, focusing on subjects ranging from contemporary U.S. politics to simple observational pieces on topics such as a trip to the post office. In 2005, many of his essays were collected in a new bestselling book titled A Man Without a Country, which he insisted would be his last contribution to letters.
Vonnegut was deeply influenced by early Socialist labor leaders, especially Indiana natives Powers Hapgood and Eugene V. Debs, and he frequently quoted them in his work. He named characters after both Debs (Eugene Debs Hartke in Hocus Pocus and Eugene Debs Metzger in Deadeye Dick) and Russian Communist leader Leon Trotsky (Leon Trotsky Trout in Galápagos). He was a lifetime member of the American Civil Liberties Union and was featured in a print advertisement for them.
In 1968, he signed the "Writers and Editors War Tax Protest" pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.
Vonnegut frequently addressed moral and political issues but rarely dealt with specific political figures until after his retirement from fiction. Though the downfall of Walter Starbuck, a minor Nixon administration bureaucrat who is the narrator and main character in Jailbird (1979), would not have occurred but for the Watergate scandal, the focus is not on the administration. His collection God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian referenced controversial assisted suicide proponent Jack Kevorkian.
With his columns for In These Times, he began an attack on the George W. Bush administration and the Iraq War. "By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East?" he wrote. "Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas." In These Times quoted him as saying "The only difference between Hitler and Bush is that Hitler was elected." In a 2003 interview Vonnegut said, "I myself feel that our country, for whose Constitution I fought in a just war, might as well have been invaded by Martians and body snatchers. Sometimes I wish it had been. What has happened, though, is that it has been taken over by means of the sleaziest, low-comedy, Keystone Cops-style coup d'etat imaginable. And those now in charge of the federal government are upper-crust C-students who know no history or geography, plus not-so-closeted white supremacists, aka 'Christians,' and plus, most frighteningly, psychopathic personalities, or 'PPs.'" When asked how he was doing at the start of a 2003 interview, he replied: "I'm mad about being old and I'm mad about being American. Apart from that, OK."
He did not regard the 2004 election with much optimism; speaking of Bush and John Kerry, he said that "no matter which one wins, we will have a Skull and Bones President at a time when entire vertebrate species, because of how we have poisoned the topsoil, the waters and the atmosphere, are becoming, hey presto, nothing but skulls and bones."
Vonnegut was descended from a family of German freethinkers, who were skeptical of "conventional religious beliefs." His great-grandfather, Clemens Vonnegut, had authored a freethought book titled Instruction in Morals, as well as an address for his own funeral in which he denied the existence of God, an afterlife, and Christian doctrines about sin and salvation. Kurt Vonnegut reproduced his great-grandfather's funeral address in his book Palm Sunday, and identified these freethought views as his "ancestral religion," declaring it a mystery as to how it was passed on to him.
Vonnegut described himself variously as a skeptic, freethinker, humanist, Unitarian Universalist, agnostic, and atheist. He disbelieved in the supernatural, considered religious doctrine to be "so much arbitrary, clearly invented balderdash," and believed people were motivated to join religions out of loneliness. He rejected the divinity of Jesus, but was nevertheless an admirer of the Sermon on the Mount. In 2003, he was one of the signatories of the Humanist Manifesto.
Vonnegut considered humanism to be a modern-day form of freethought, and advocated it in various writings, speeches and interviews. His ties to organized humanism included membership as a Humanist Laureate in the Council for Secular Humanism's International Academy of Humanism. In 1992, the American Humanist Association named him the Humanist of the Year. Vonnegut went on to serve as honorary president of the American Humanist Association (AHA), having taken over the position from his late colleague Isaac Asimov, and serving until his own death in 2007. In a letter to AHA members, Vonnegut wrote: "I am a humanist, which means, in part, that I have tried to behave decently without expectations of rewards or punishments after I am dead."
Vonnegut was at one time a member of a Unitarian congregation. Palm Sunday reproduces a sermon he delivered to the First Parish Unitarian Church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, concerning William Ellery Channing, who was a principal founder of Unitarianism in the United States. In 1986, Vonnegut spoke to a gathering of Unitarian Universalists in Rochester, New York, and the text of his speech is reprinted in his book Fates Worse Than Death. Also reprinted in that book was a "mass" by Vonnegut, which was performed by a Unitarian Universalist choir in Buffalo, New York. Vonnegut identified Unitarianism as the religion that many in his freethinking family turned to when freethought and other German "enthusiasms" became unpopular in the United States during the World Wars. Vonnegut's parents were married by a Unitarian minister, and his son had at one time aspired to become a Unitarian minister.
More information:
Code:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/2778055.Kurt_Vonnegut |
Books
Kurt Vonnegut - Slaughterhouse-Five (read by James Franco)
Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle (read by Tony Roberts)
Kurt Vonnegut - Breakfast Of Champions (read by John Malkovich)
Kurt Vonnegut - The Sirens Of Titan (read by Jay Snyder)
Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night (read by Victor Bevine)
Kurt Vonnegut - Galapagos (read by Jonathan Davis)
Kurt Vonnegut - Welcome To The Monkey House (read by Bill Irwin, Maria Tucci, Dylan Baker, David Strathairn and Tony Roberts)
Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (read by Eric Michael Summerer)
Kurt Vonnegut - Player Piano (read by Christian Rummel)
Kurt Vonnegut - A Man Without A Country (read by Norman Dietz)
Kurt Vonnegut - Bluebeard (read by Mark Bramhall)
Kurt Vonnegut - Timequake (read by Arthur Bishop)
Kurt Vonnegut - Hocus Pocus (read by Norman Dietz)
Kurt Vonnegut - Deadeye D*ick (read by Hall Telly)
Kurt Vonnegut - Jailbird (read by Bob Askey)
Kurt Vonnegut - God Bless You, Dr. Kevorkian (read by Scott Brick)
Kurt Vonnegut - 2BRO2B (read by Various narrators)
Kurt Vonnegut - Armageddon In Retrospect (read by Rip Torn)
Kurt Vonnegut - Bagombo Snuff Box (read by Kurt Vonnegut and Alexander Marshall)
Kurt Vonnegut - If This Isn't Nice, What Is? (read by Scott Brick and Kevin T. Collins)
Kurt Vonnegut - Sucker's Portfolio (read by Luke Daniels)
Code:
Books
http://rapidgator.net/file/af31edf5df15a8c3e1e839e1a7599492/Slaughterhouse_Five.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/776d94c8c7ea20e1e0e0c71ea10da7b3/Cats_Cradle.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/058a0f9562d0e749f18334071330560a/Breakfast_Of_Champions.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/08d53a3ccb87ec5c82455b117d9724a2/The_Sirens_Of_Titan.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/1ed2be73a2b17485ac6b4593c1995c51/Mother_Night.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/91cf9159688ec444fb5c4bc0a5dc11e5/Galapagos.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/b25267c58341f84bca4d5d5c3c4bd920/Welcome_To_The_Monkey_House.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/ebdb9df9a8bef9a0626f5496a662d34f/God_Bless_You_Mr_Rosewater.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/e07b47c40653d61ea9827968da38a300/Player_Piano.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/5ee9291676788e49f7438ace1f0c3dfa/A_Man_Without_A_Country.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/05a34139baf2dc251616d639d4f25756/Bluebeard.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/5aec215c19101b3549e6be0b62dadbdb/Timequake.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/b6a40060a86519da6e29837081e9b877/Hocus_Pocus.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/ae9c7f1637ecd1dc128d3ab89d7d1433/Deadeye_D1ick.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/37e29b5216dfeafbef9cfcb23cbe04f4/Jailbird.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/3cbc23eeddeac9bc5dae4252712c1db0/God_Bless_You_Dr_Kevorkian.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/5022451bc8ca9aee9c0f889213eae533/2BRO2B.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/35803b33a4c562ecfc64e4004857f5c6/Armageddon_In_Retrospect.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/883996e093089924d0eb3a8699057f16/Bagombo_Snuff_Box.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/2145e7b0bd73befd890dbf036158241e/If_This_Isnt_Nice_What_Is.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/026a41d190773bfa7c9bc7d7894f090d/Suckers_Portfolio.rar.html |
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